A Peep Into The Future
by rain and leaves
Summary: London: 1919. Five years is an awfully long time. (complete)
1. Default Chapter

Disclaimer: If you recognise it, it's not mine.

AN: This is set in an alternate universe, in which the events of the movie occur in 1914, not 1899. It's a strange little bunny that I thought of as I was writing Neverland, and I thought it was probably best to get it out of my system. I'm sorry if it's a little awful; I was the slightest bit tight when I wrote it.

A Peep Into The Future.

Peter has not been in this city for five years, but even his fluid sense of reality tells him that this is a different London from the one that he left. And this place . . . 

He doesn't like to doubt Tinkerbell, but he'd found himself highly sceptical when she'd brought him to this building. 

The Wendy girl spends every night here, she'd said. Sometimes she stays here until the sun comes up.

He has landed in the courtyard behind the small building. It's a dirty, hopeless sort of a place where rubbish is stacked. There is a small door in the filthy wall that leads inside. He shouldn't be frightened to open that door, but he is.

It had seemed such a good plan.

He has spent so long in Neverland, patiently letting her grow up a little, rather less patiently allowing himself to do the same. He wants her to make her choice now, on the cusp of childhood and womanhood, knowing exactly what it is that she wants. He does not think in these terms, knowing only that this time, he wants it to be right.

It had seemed a good plan.

But this place . . . 

He is glad Tinkerbell isn't here. He would hate for her to see him like this, staring at what he must admit is a rather ordinary sort of door. It's not like him to be so anxious, but he has a terribly bad feeling about this.

"Wendy is in there," he says aloud, hoping to bolster his courage. 

He opens the door and slips inside before he can allow himself to wonder why that thought frightens him more.

The room is small, dark and loud. Noises assault his ears – braying laughter, women's brittle voices, people of both sexes shouting and shrieking at one another and, under it all, some kind of music that is gay and desperate all at once and makes him want to scream. 

Tinkerbell has explained to him what a night-club is. He didn't believe her until now. He also didn't believe that Wendy would ever be found in such a place, but he thinks now that he might have been wrong about that, too. For he has seen her.

There has always been something in Peter that has known Wendy, that would have known her anywhere, that could have pointed her out to him within a heartbeat even if all the nations of the world were gathered about her. It is something in her that draws his eyes and makes his heart turn over in his chest.

Were it not for that, he would not have recognised her now.

Wendy – for it is impossible even now to think of her in any other way – sits at a crowded table, leaning lazily back in her chair. Her brown hair is bobbed, straight as a pin. Her eyes are almost hidden behind rings of kohl. Her laughing mouth is lipsticked red. She holds a cocktail in one hand, a cigarette-holder in the other, and the arm of the man beside her as if it were a stole. She lowers her lashes as he whispers in her ear.

Something hits Peter like a sword through the heart, and he seems to see the red eyes of Captain Hook through the swirling smoke of the room.

Hoarsely, terrified, he calls out her name.

For a long, agonising moment he thinks she has not heard him – but of course she could not hear him, the room was so loud – but she would hear him, she _would _she was hisWendy she would hear him anywhere –

And then her head turns, and she is looking at the door. Though he cannot read the expression on her suddenly still face something choking and tight in him seems to loosen just a little.

She excuses herself and makes her way to the door, and when she is walking towards him he realises that she is not walking, she is _swaying_ towards him, all stiletto heels and silken stockings and painted eyes, and it is only when he has come to this realisation that he sees her recognise him in the darkness.

He cannot speak. She does not.

They stare at one another, and then he pulls her out into the dingy courtyard. The door falls to behind them, cutting off the sound and fury from within.

"Wendy," he says, and is horrified to hear it sound like a plea.

"Peter Pan," she says. 

He does not know what she means.

They look at one another again, and she makes a short sort of motion to him with one gloved hand. His breath catches, and she stops.

Hopelessly, he says, "I've come to take you back. You wanted to stay, so I. But I . . . I waited for you. I grew up for you, and I waited. Wendy . . ."

He doesn't even know what he's saying, but something has to fill this awful silence. The silence of the courtyard is bad, but the silence in her eyes is far, far worse.

"Peter." she says again. "Come to take me back."

She looks away, tapping the ash from her cigarette. She takes a long, practised drag. This is something he has seen Hook do, and it kills him to see her do it now.

"It's been five years, Peter," she says, and now her eyes when she looks at him are cold and distant. "Do you know what five years is?"

"What has happened to you?" he asks miserably.

She laughs at that, a harsh laugh that does not suit her.

"A war has happened, Peter. It has happened to the entire world. I have seen boys I went to school with trot merrily off to war; coming back from the Front in pieces or not at all. I have played Mother to filthy warehouses of boys barely older than I that have been gassed, wounded, maimed – boys that have died drowning in the fluid in their own lungs while I watched, I -"

She breaks off at that, drawing again on her cigarette. Her voice when it next comes makes his blood run cold. 

"Last year John enlisted. Lied about his age. He was killed less than a week before hostilities ended. Slightly contracted influenza and died not long after. Mother cracked – she's in a lunatic-asylum in Kent."

He does not realise he is crying until he tastes tears in his mouth.

"So you see, Peter," and her voice is so cold, "you've come too late. I grew up a very long time ago."

"No," he manages, "No. You don't belong in there, Wendy. You don't belong in that place; this isn't you!"

"This is me!" she returns vehemently. "I've cried my tears and I've watched my people die and now all I want to do is be a bright young thing and have fun!"

"That isn't fun!" he cries, "That's death! Can't you feel death in there?"

She backs away a step, shaking her head. Her voice trembles. "This isn't real. This isn't happening. I've cracked just like Mother did, and now I fancy I'm talking to Peter Pan behind the club. I've gone mad. You're not real."

"No," he says, gripping her roughly by her slight shoulders. The distance in her eyes is beginning to panic him.

"I can't hear you."

"No, please!"

"I can't see you."

"Wendy!" he howls desperately, and it's _happening_, and it hurts so much more than he'd ever imagined.

She dislodges his grip with gentle black-gloved hands.

She looks into his eyes. 

Her voice is a whisper.

"I don't believe in fairies."

The door shuts behind her with the faintest click, and for a long time all Peter does is cry.


	2. Two

Disclaimer: If you recognise it, it's not mine.

AN: I originally intended this fic to be a one-shot; despite reviewers asking for more I felt that it was finished. However, poor AU Wendy and Peter told me very emphatically that they weren't close to done. I've therefore expanded this fic to a three-parter, with part three coming very soon.

A Peep Into The Future.

Two.

Wendy's window had been unlocked, the window of the strange bedroom that must now be hers. It had heartened him a little. Now, hours later, he is not crying any more.

Her narrow bed with the cut out hearts is gone. In its place in the darkened room he can see a large sprawl of dark wood and cream silk, pillows opulent behind the half tester's sleek drapes. My heart's cut out, Peter thinks suddenly, and she doesn't have one any more. 

He turns away from the bed.

He is waiting for her at the window, looking down into the murky grey of the nighttime streets when the automobile pulls up. Tinkerbell has explained about these too, and these too he has discovered he hates. A man emerges from the far side, pauses at the front window of the machine, then opens the rear door. A silken leg can be seen, and a spiked heel touches the ground. Rather unsteadily, the rest of Wendy follows. 

Peter leans out of the open window; the better to see them make their way to the front door of the Darling house. The dark haired man has an arm around Wendy's waist, and he leans down now to whisper something in her ear. She laughs, shaking a reproving finger and saying something Peter cannot hear. Then she sways, leaning heavily on the brick wall of the house, and with a sick shiver he realises that she is drunk. 

The man at her side leans in, and before he goes back to his automobile Peter has to watch this man kiss Wendy's laughing mouth. He cannot breathe. He is so angry he cannot breathe; he clutches the window frame so tightly even this polished wood threatens to splinter his hands. It hurts so much Peter thinks he is going to die. 

There is a low click from downstairs as the front door is unlocked, and after a short time and a muffled thump there is the sound of a person in stockinged feet coming stealthily up the stairs. At this late hour he can clearly hear the automobile pull away, and he finds that he can listen until it is gone.

It takes him until she reaches the very door of the room to realise that his knife is drawn. He sheathes it.

The door opens.

Wendy ignores him, and it feels as if he's choking and he thinks that maybe she really can't see him, and then he realises that she is whispering under her breath, and what she is whispering is _can't, I can't, I can't._

She weaves a little towards the washstand, and in complete silence he watches her wash her makeup off. Her stiletto shoes lie forlorn on the floor. Quiet watery sounds fill the air. She shrugs off her dark coat and dries her face. 

This is surreal. He does not speak.

She retires behind an ornamental screen, sounds of cloth on cloth and a silken shiver that could only be those unholy stockings. Some kind of exotic perfume wafts about the room, rich and redolent with spice. He waits in the glow of the streetlamps; listens to her whisper to herself. If he knew of these things he might have thought that she was praying.

_Can't see, I can't, I can't, I can't._

She emerges, and suddenly he cannot breathe; thinks his heart has stopped. A cold diffused gloom hangs about Wendy, barefoot girl in a long white nightgown, pale-faced girl with cropped martyr's hair. One of the buttons of her nightgown is undone; with that perfume comes a sticky sweet air, and while he thinks at once of medicine he knows it must be rum. She tugs on a heavy scarlet dressing gown. Sways. Ties the cord loosely about her waist. 

She is drunk, and she looks like a consumptive. She's Wendy, and she's achingly beautiful.

"Wendy," he says softly. 

"It's dark," she informs him, her voice low and throaty with cigarettes and drink; faintest echo of the clear story-telling voice he remembers. She does not look at him. "I could be mistaken. You could be a shadow . . . it's dark, you know. I can't see you. I'm not mad."

He stares at her. She says, vaguely, "I can't, you know." Rummaging in a drawer, her short hair hangs over her face. This seems important. 

A match flares in the darkness, and he jumps. Now she is holding a lit cigarette and a bottle, nudging the drawer shut with a hip. He remembers exactly how blue her eyes could be, but in this cold and unlit room they could be black.

"Wendy," he says again. She's drunk. He doesn't know what else to say.

The bottle is open; he doesn't know how she has done it. She sips rum, winces, sips again. The sharp, sweet smell twists in the air like the grey cigarette smoke. 

"That man outside," Peter says, the taste of medicine in the back of his throat. "Is he your husband?"

She makes a sound that could pass for a laugh. "Dickie? No, God no." She sips again from the half-full bottle, laughing again so that it sounds like a sob. "God no; God knows how I loved you . . . I can't . . . "

She looks at the carpet, shaking her head as if to clear it. "Can't see you. Can't hear you either. I'm not mad. I'm not."

He doesn't know how he feels or what he feels, only that he _feels_ and that it is excruciating. He thinks - it hasn't all come true - and he's staring as she goes past him to the window. "God knows how I killed you," she says softly, and the window goes up with a rush of cold air. Swirling rum tobacco sharp night air, and she's so close to him now her heady perfume is dizzying.  

"Don't you remember?" he is asking. She lowers herself carefully onto the windowsill, her bare feet hanging over a two-storey drop. He is looking down at her, her profile in the moonlight and her eyes gaslight blue. That bed with the cut out hearts, and the warmth of her, and her hair when it brushed his face. Sunlight through her hair; sunlight trapped in her long brown hair.

"I've forgotten all about you," she says mechanically, though she couldn't possibly have heard. 

He says, "Wendy," kneeling on the carpet behind her, and though he'd sworn he wouldn't cry again his eyes his eyes burn and his voice is stricken and very small. "Is Slightly really dead?"

She does not look at him, staring out at the stars as her cigarette burns down. He thinks she is not going to reply, but then she begins to speak, so quietly he must move closer just to hear her, so close he thinks he will drown in the low hum of her voice. 

"The day we got the letter saying that my brother had died," she is saying, "my mother didn't say a word. And then the day after the memorial, we heard her laughing in an empty room. She was holding armfuls of flowers, and she said didn't the house seem brighter since John had come home."

_My brother_, he thinks, _my mother_. They've fallen away; she keeps them away. Wendy's mother's smile behind those flowers. It all _hurts_ so much, pain building on pain building on her heady perfume until he can barely breathe. 

She tips the rum bottle again; sips delicately. Cold stars in the cold sky. "We thought she'd stop it eventually," she says, her voice without expression. "Everything was so difficult, and then Stephen caught the 'flu . . . " she stops, thinking for a moment. "Slightly," she says, with a bare trace of uncertainty. "Before he was my cousin. We called him Slightly then."

Peter nods. The road far below her, he thinks, grey road in the grey night. We called him Slightly. How many nights does she sit here, as drunk as she is now, without anyone to catch her? Her cigarette has almost burnt down, and with a negligent gesture she drops it down to that grey road, watching the glowing speck of it fall. He can't stop thinking of Slightly, and of Wendy's brother, both dying far from home. 

"We nursed him in turns, my mother and my aunt and I. And then one day I was . . . I was fetching water for someone, a glass of water, and my mother came out of the sickroom and said, come quickly, he's sitting up and feeling much better."

Her voice is very calm, very detached. "I knew. I didn't have to see him to know. White like that on the pillow, you see, and my mother chatting away to him, I didn't have to . . . I did. She went away before the funeral. Talking to them in that place. Saying why doesn't Wendy visit anymore."

She closes her eyes, and says, "Because I killed them. Talking about mothers, bringing them back to wars and epidemics. I brought them here, and they died here, and my mother cracked, and now I - "

Wendy opens those blue eyes and looks right at him, that drunken intensity. "Now I see you," she says, very softly. "Now I see you. How did you die, Peter?"

He stares back at her, shaken as much by what she's saying as by her eyes. "I didn't," he says, "I didn't -"

"Weren't we happy, right at the end? Every question answered," she says to herself, looking away and out at the stars again. "And now there really is nothing. I'm cold."

Her hand comes to her face, and lightly her fingers drift in the cold air over the place where her kiss used to be. "Every question," she repeats, "every question, but now I don't know how you died."

He is afraid to touch her again, wanting it desperately. Powerless not to. Instead of answering again he reaches out, slowly as if in a dream, and when his hands close over her slight shoulders it's a shock, cool and solid as if he'd expected her to be the ghost.  She doesn't move or resist, and very gently he picks her up. She's so light, lighter he thinks now than she was five years ago. She doesn't say anything, not even when he lays her carefully down on that great bed. This is the thing to be done; this is the only thing that can be done. Slightly dead and John dead, and Wendy's mother mad and Wendy herself drunk and wishing herself dead – there is a warmth on his face that must be tears. He's not crying, but the tears come and won't stop. 

She watches him under her lashes. He's folding the bedclothes over onto her, tucking the blankets around her cool body. She says softly, "I still don't know," and he doesn't know what she means. 

She passes out very gently, and before he knows it she is sleeping like the dead - like a drunken angel. Like Sleeping Beauty. 

Like a fairytale suicide.  

Peter tips the rum out of the window, dropping the bottle into the street below. He gets a little on his hands; sticky and sweet, it tastes like death or maybe like Wendy's mouth. He closes the window. Lights the lamps. 

In the low warm light, he watches Wendy sleep.


	3. Three

Disclaimer: If you recognise it, it's not mine.

AN: Sorry it's taken this long, but it's been hard to find a spare moment alone at my place lately. Thank you and thank you again to everyone who reviewed – if it hadn't been for you, the story would probably have ended at chapter one. 

Three.

A cool waft of air as Tinkerbell flits in. A low click as she shuts the window behind her. 

"She's drunk," Peter says softly, not knowing quite what else to say. Tinkerbell just nods. She knows. Hasn't she watched Wendy long enough to know?

For a long moment, they are just looking at Wendy, looking and saying nothing. Then Tinkerbell flies over to the bed, and stands on the pillow. She looks down at Wendy's closed eyes as if she can see right through them, right into her dreams. She looks sombre, terribly serious.

"Can you help?" he asks quietly. She looks up and shrugs, jingling softly. _Would you like to see?_

"How?" But he is already moving, settling himself carefully on the bed bedside Wendy. The silk coverlet is cold. Tinkerbell is incongruous in this setting, only herself, the same as ever, when everything else has changed. 

Wendy does not stir or wake. Tinkerbell says, _Look_.

And suddenly there it is, as clear as the room about him and as immediate – disjointed flashes of memory, half-remembered words and snatches of music that compose Wendy's drunken dream. She dreams she's awake and sitting on the windowsill, and he's saying come away, come away. And she dreams of cold bright stars. But this is confusing and incoherent and loud. 

Peter goes lower, seeing a long grey hall; featureless doors shut tight, some almost hidden behind piles and piles of pearls. Every single pearl, he understands without knowing how he knows, is an unkind word, a sharp tone, or a loved one disappointed, layered and layered over and again with guilt. Layered with gilt and guilt; they are of impossible size. She's drowning in them, drowning herself in sticky sweet medicine for them. 

Behind one door, which opens barely a crack, he sees white pinafores and black wool stockings and puddings in the nursery, a red-haired toddler that must be her youngest brother – but all this is filtered grey; there's no feeling here at all. Through the keyhole of another featureless door there is an older John in khaki clothes, rain sleeting down all around him that cannot have been there, because John is standing inside. Peter watches the rain for a long moment, grey chilling rain. 

Voices coming as if through water behind another door, this one locked and bolted. He can hear his own voice and hers, the ones he remembers. 

In the bedroom, Peter stares unseeing at the wall. He is distantly aware of Tinkerbell watching him, and of his own hands that have somehow gone without his conscious will to hold on to Wendy. Is this her mind? Is this where she lives? 

He walks without walking down the corridors, listening for the sound of steel on steel or children's laughter or even Captain Hook, because that at least he is sure would have colour. Here though, there are only bloodless scenes. Quiet hours alone in a quiet room. The sound of a clock ticking – and here he hears a whisper of Wendy's voice – _ticking away the seconds of my life_. 

Wendy in a grey skirt, white blouse, black cardigan – this mechanical mourning. A book open in her lap, unread. Her eyes are closed and in her thoughts he catches a familiar phrase, quoted and quoted until the words themselves have lost all meaning and only the desolation of them remains. 

"No bells," she is thinking tiredly, "no tears. This is the end of the world."

_What are you looking for?_ Tinkerbell asks, and suddenly he sees her reflected in Wendy's mirror. Her own light, and the low light of Wendy's lamps. For a minute he does not know, and then he says without willing it, "Light . . . light. A happy thought."

Her small face in the mirror. Tonight Tinkerbell feels only compassion for them both.

_Here_, she says, and here he is before another of these doors, but through this keyhole a shaft of sunlight is shining. Sunlight shining through into this grey hall, grasped at gratefully. The door is unlocked so he opens it, and here with the warmth of the light almost tangible about him . . . here for a moment he thinks what he is seeing is beautiful.

This is Wendy's last happy thought - a sunlit river bordered by long grass and flowers; flowers strewn in the cool green-brown water, tangling in her long brown hair. Her white waterlogged nightgown clinging to her. Blue of the sky in her luminous eyes, golden light dappling her as she drifts. Riverwater lapping about her - over her rose-pink lips, her pale face, her serene unblinking eyes. Water and flowers and light, the things she loved.

_Loved_, because in Wendy's happy ending, she is dead.

Peter stands there, listening to birdsong somewhere above him. 

It's so peaceful here. 

Down in the stream, she looks peaceful. As peaceful as she looked sleeping so many years ago. It feels like a hundred years since then. It feels like a thousand, the girl drifting there forever. _Don't touch her_, Tinkerbell warns, and he's holding on to her there in the place that must be real, but right here he can't stand to leave her in the water. 

_She's happy,_ Tinkerbell says, and he says "She's dead," and he can hear his own voice against the birdsong and the quiet sound of the river. Wendy, which is just a word now that means _love_ and _forever_ and _always_ and _mine_, Wendy is dead in the river, and she's so lovely there. 

"Tinkerbell, I wish - " he begins, looking down at her there and the distant sense of her under his hands, Tinkerbell shaking her head and saying _Don't, don't_ . . . 

"Tinkerbell I _wish_," he says again, and without letting himself think about what he is doing Peter steps through the door.

There is a _crack_ like the end of the world, and a rushing howling and the bedroom with its lamps and window fades away around him and the door behind him disappears and is gone, and then Peter is really there, there by the stream and Wendy's eyes widen and she gasps for air, and he's running _running_ down there and into the water.

Choking and frightened as he reaches her in the cool and shallow stream, she clings to him. "Wendy," he's saying to her, "Here you are, you're here, keep breathing," and she coughs and breathes and her long wet hair trails in the water. 

"Why," she says, or maybe "What," and she breathes and shudders again and she's cool from the river, a thousand years in the river. Her soaking nightgown and the river around them, flowers still caught in the tangle of her hair. 

He carries her, unprotesting, up onto the bank. Lays her down among the summer flowers and the warm green grass. She looks beyond him, up at the sky, sky blue eyes - just breathing. 

"Wendy," he says again, but Wendy looks as though she is finished, as though it is over. It's too late. 

This isn't how it ends, he thinks desperately. But then, with a sudden stillness, he knows. 

How they all end. 

Gentle sound of the river and the birds about them. Sunlight shining down on Wendy, lying unmoving among the flowers. And so, because this is how they all end, because this is the answer to all the questions, Peter leans down very carefully and kisses her. Just lightly, just gently, nothing more really than the touch of her mouth, but it's enough. He loves her, and because of this it is enough. Just feeling her breathe, and the air around them heavy with the fragrance of the crushed flowers. 

And when he raises himself a little, and looks down at her, she is looking at him. 

Right at him, right into him, and her blue eyes are full now of water that is not from the river. "You're not dead," she says, like a child woken from a nightmare. It sounds like a question, so he says, "No."

It's her voice, Wendy's own familiar voice. "Am I dead?" she asks now, petals in her long hair and the sun drying droplets of the river off her, and she, the princess of all the stories, looking at him as though he is the only person in the world.

"No," Peter says again, but something in her face seems to need more. He says, knowing he is right, "You're not dead. This is all real; it's Neverland. You're home."

And then, incredibly, she is crying. Crying and crying, that cold-voiced woman who drowned herself every night is crying and crying beneath him in the flowers. And her cool arms have come up around him and suddenly she is holding him as tightly as he is holding her, and suddenly she is entirely a warm, living girl. 

For a long time, all she does is cry.

And this may have been a good place to end the story, Peter thinks, something to think of as the end. But this is a happy ending, and happy endings, as Peter understands them – as Neverland understands them – never end in tears.

Wendy knows about endings. So there by that river, when she is finally still again, she looks up again and says, "_Peter_," and kisses him. Sweet like that, on the bank of that river; the birds singing, and the sunlit flowers, and the taste of tears still on her lips.

And this is enough.

Wendy and Peter Pan are home, and because of this it will always be enough. 


End file.
